


The Pact of Hephaestion and Patroclus

by ClockworkCourier



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canonical Character Death, Fate & Destiny, Friends to Lovers, Ghosts, Greek Mythology - Freeform, History Jokes, M/M, Mutual Pining, Mythology References, Pre-Canon, Sharing Body Heat, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Team as Family, Tragedy/Comedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 06:27:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8152312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkCourier/pseuds/ClockworkCourier
Summary: “You know,” the other one remarked thoughtfully, gazing out at the imaginary spot again. “We really could get something out of this. Two heroes that end up happy and... I don’t know. Maybe they’ll live to old age.”“That’d be new and novel,” the younger one drawled, leaning back so his head rested on the remains of a stone sandal-clad foot. “A destined, tragic hero living to be geriatric.” He said it mockingly, but there was the barest shine of hope in his words.---Alternatively; two ghosts known for being the secondary entity of their famous pairs finally manage to sway the fates of their successors, with varying degrees of success.





	

**Author's Note:**

> How this fic came to be:
> 
> Me: Hey, you know what I need in the midst of all the other projects I'm doing? Another fic. Another fic with five chapters outlined, all inspired by the Song of Achilles and the fact I had to read a portion of the biography of Alexander the Great for class! Brilliant! Not weird at all!
> 
> I'm so sorry for this. I'm sorry for the sassy ghosts being really awful life coaches. Please don't allow any ghost to be your life coach, because I promise you they will not have a good track record.
> 
> (Dedicated to the lovely people at the Reaper76 discord server. <3)

Once upon a time, two dead men sat and talked at the end of the world.  
  
Except that’s not quite right. It wasn’t the end of the world, but there was something there, right at the edge, so small and almost insignificant that anyone else might not have noticed. No one would have called it the end of the world, because for as many years as people had claimed the world was ending, it hadn’t happened yet. No one knew what the end of the world looked like.   
  
But the two dead men knew fairly well what it _might_ have looked like, as tiny as it was.   
  
There, right at that strange edge where ghosts walk and the dead linger, something else was born. And for two ghosts well-versed in the strange and cruel flow of fate, this was alarming.   
  
“Damnit!” one said, or as close as the word ‘damnit’ could be in ancient Greek.   
  
And so the first word uttered in the space of all time and life and death when Gabriel Reyes was born was ‘damnit’.   
  
\---   
  
The end of the world started with two babies born on two near-opposite ends of the United States of America. At a too-clean hospital in Los Angeles, Gabriel Reyes entered the world with a pair of ghosts cursing up a storm in the ephemeral in-between and his grandmother happily weeping while patting his father’s arm enthusiastically and praising the Lord in Spanish. A healthy baby, all eight pounds six ounces of him, and only the dead knew what that meant.   
  
A year and a half later, another baby was born in the town of Seymour, Indiana, with hair so cornsilk blonde that he looked bald, and his face so red and pruny that his older siblings eyed him and cringed and wondered why their parents looked so happy about having a baby who looked like a little old man. His name was Jonathan Morrison, and they knew they would call him Jack. In one corner of the hospital room, his older sister piped up and asked why they just didn’t put ‘Jack’ on his birth certificate if they weren’t actually going to call him Jonathan. No one really listened to her, and no one listened to the two dead men groaning and putting their heads in their hands.   
  
“Really?” one of them asked absolutely nothing. Maybe one of the lifeless shades slinking around the edges of the ruined columns dotting the afterlife. “Did he have to be blonde? What do the gods have with blondes and--”   
  
The other one shut him up by waving a hand in his face. “Don’t say anything. Maybe they’ll forget.”   
  
Jack Morrison opened his eyes for the first time when a ghost sighed in irritation.   
  
\---   
  
Things went normal, and the two ghosts had some kind of hope. But hope cradled in the Underworld has a tendency to not be well-founded, and the Fates weren’t empathetic, famously. So the ghosts watched as Jack Morrison and Gabriel Reyes grew and excelled and slowly began to shape into the men they were destined to be. There were whispers amongst the shades, whispers that carried like dandelion fluff in the wind over the barren, empty fields of the dead, saying that there were new heroes beginning to glow like a new sunrise at the edge of the horizon. A new age dawns, they said. The age of men passing once more into an age with heroes like--   
  
“ _No!_ ” shouted one of the ghosts, only slightly startling a nearby shade who just slinked away like a scolded cat. “No, absolutely _not!_ ”   
  
The two of them had felt the rippling of the Fates’ design, the one that had guided Jack Morrison’s hands to submit his ASVAB as Gabriel Reyes had done exactly one year earlier. In the terms of the ghosts and the shades that surrounded them, this was the equivalent of taking up a sword and spear for your kingdom. The two of them were about to enter the military, donning kevlar in place of breastplates of polished bronze, and Advanced Combat helmets with deep green camouflage instead of metal ones that shined like gold. The honors were similar, however, and their names would someday carry weight and legend.   
  
In short, it didn’t take any god or immortal to notice a pattern, especially one that had been repeated for thousands of years.   
  
“Alright,” said the other ghost, trying to placate the one that shouted. His hands fluttered over the other’s shoulders like a pair of doves, trying to summon peace in the place of rage the likes of which only sat in Hephaestus’ forge. “Listen, we can fix this. It doesn’t _have_ to go the same way.”   
  
The ghost that shouted rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest, glaring hard at that imaginary spot where he had been envisioning the young Jack smiling wide and bright like the sun crowned his head, shaking hands and effectively sealing the first leg of a gauntlet of fate. “Since when have we been able to do that? In case you haven’t noticed, we died because we couldn’t stop it.” He didn’t even try to mask his bitterness.   
  
“Yeah, well, it’s a new age?” the other one offered with a shrug. “Happy new year?”   
  
The two of them sat in a sullen, damp silence. One shade slunk around a column until another one bumped into it. Someone might have apologized, but it just sounded like a low, pained grumble.   
  
The Underworld sucked.   
  
“Okay,” said the bitter one, uncrossing his arms and glaring at the spot. “Last try. Third time’s the charm.”   
  
“Third time’s the charm,” the other one repeated in agreement.   
  
A shade grunted and it sounded like ‘third time’s the charm’.   
  
\---   
  
Gabriel Reyes couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This young kid (actually only a year and a half younger, according to his chart, but _still_ ) was doing a handstand in the middle of the gravelled courtyard, causing the recruits next to him to burst into laughter and try to knock him over. That was all fine and good, except they should have been doing laps. Gabe grimaced and summoned his best drill sergeant face before marching over to them, preparing to unleash the fury of a commanding officer scorned. He heard a low ‘oooh!’ of warning from one of the recruits, and two of them looked like they were ready to scurry away.   
  
Then the kid gracefully righted himself like a gymnast, his cheeks tinged a healthy pink and a grin like pure sunshine crossing his face. He had eyes that rivaled the sky on a good day and the ocean on a better day, and his hair was all polished gold.   
  
“Oh, for the love of Hera,” one of the ghosts hissed. “No more of _that_ bullshit. That needed to die with Homer.” He irritably waved his right hand, as though it might dispel Gabe’s poetic thoughts like smoke in the wind.   
  
Gabe’s eyes narrowed and he crossed his arms over his chest. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?” he ground out.   
  
The kid just kept smiling, brighter than the flickering LED lamps in the barracks. “Exercising,” he said simply.   
  
“Uh huh. Would you like to give me the proper definition of exercise in terms of what was scheduled for you today?”   
  
Only because he was looking for it, Gabe saw the barest guilty glance cast around at the track and the glaring recruits circling it. “Running laps, sir.”   
  
“And are you running laps--” He looked down at the kid’s name patch. “Private Morrison?”   
  
“No, sir.”   
  
“Why do you think it’s completely alright for your fellow recruits to do what they were told and run laps while you do handstands in the middle?”   
  
“I finished all the laps.”   
  
Twenty-five. They were set to do twenty-five laps. There was no way in all of God’s green earth that this kid could have finished that many in the amount of time he had. Most of the people still running hadn’t even gotten onto their fifteenth.   
  
“You seriously expect me to believe that?”   
  
The kid had the barest signs of a grimace on his face before he shrugged. “I can do it again, if you want,” he offered. “It wasn’t that hard.”   
  
“ _Wasn’t that--_ ” Gabe stopped himself short before he launched into a fit of rage. His mother had always said he needed to control his temper, but he could tell that this kid was going to make it hard for him. He breathed in and let it out slowly through his nose before giving Private Morrison the hardest glare he could summon in lieu of a shitfit. “You know what? Go for it. Ten more and I’ll see if that’s even _close_ to realistic. But if I decide it isn’t? You’re gonna be awfully sorry, _Private_ Morrison.” He was pulling rank, but it was necessary. Too many times, these kids from some podunk town in the middle of nowhere thought they were hot because they had set some records in football or cross country. He wasn’t having it.   
  
The kid gave him a short nod before hustling back out to the track at a half-jog. He found a place deemed the starting line, and took off.   
  
And god _damn_ if he didn’t prove his point.   
  
The kid was running like the wind itself was under his heels. His form was absolutely flawless, and he outpaced his fellow recruits like an Olympian running among civilians. Gabe came to understand that the glares weren’t because Morrison was slacking off, but because they were _jealous._ The kid had outrun all of them in more than half the time it would have normally took, and didn’t even seem winded. He just ran, as free and careless as he pleased, like ten more laps was absolutely nothing to him.   
  
He finished his ten at the same time a few of the other recruits were finishing their whole set, and more than half of them still had a ways to go. He jogged back over to Gabe, only breathing a little heavier than normal, but otherwise completely fine. He smiled expectantly. “So?”   
  
The other ghost frowned, hard. “No,” he commanded, like he could shout right into Gabe’s ear. “That was great. Whatever. So he’s a little better than the other guys. Don’t let him get away with it.”   
  
“For showing off and distracting the other recruits when they could have been finishing their set, you get the latrines tonight,” Gabe said, leaving no room in his tone for budging. He watched Morrison’s shoulders fall and his eyes widen. A few of the others had gathered around, curious. He regarded them all with a sharp dip of his chin. “The rest of you can hit the showers and then go to the mess.”   
  
They all started wandering back to the barracks with scattered conversation and laughter, while Morrison just stood fixed in place, looking at Gabe like he had been stunned. “ _What?_ ”   
  
Gabe regarded him with a raised eyebrow. “You have a problem, _Private?_ ”   
  
The kid didn’t even bother to check his temper. “Yeah! I do!” he snapped. “I just showed you exactly what you wanted, and I’m getting punished for it?”   
  
Gabe stalked up to him like a mountain lion on a deer. They were right around the same height, so there wasn’t much looming to be done, but Gabe still had that sense of presence that could be downright intimidating if he channeled it right. “Yes, you are,” he said, his voice all low and dangerous. “You show off, you pull ahead, and you leave your fellow recruits behind. This isn’t a competition, Morrison. You didn’t come here to prove you’re the best. There are no gold medals out here. If you leave them in the field the way you just did here, they get hurt. They get _killed._ Do you want that?”   
  
Morrison set his jaw, fury bright in his eyes, and shook his head.   
  
“That’s what I thought. Are you going to question my orders again?”   
  
He shook his head again. Gabe didn’t miss the way his fists curled next to his legs, but he didn’t say anything about it.   
  
“Right. Latrines. Get on it _now._ ”   
  
He watched Morrison jog away, the tension visibly set in his whole body, his brain probably supplying several dozen colorful ways to cuss out his commanding officer.   
  
A world and then some away, the two ghosts sat back with something like relief.   
  
“This might just work,” one said, crossing one leg over the other at the knee. He leaned back on the shattered pedestal of someone who might have been a king. The name was eroded away, so only the -IAS was visible in the stone. No one paid attention to the statues that dotted the landscape, except to use them as perches and benches. The two ghosts were no different.   
  
“You know,” the other one remarked thoughtfully, gazing out at the imaginary spot again. “We really could get something out of this. Two heroes that end up happy and... I don’t know. Maybe they’ll live to old age.”   
  
“That’d be new and novel,” the younger one drawled, leaning back so his head rested on the remains of a stone sandal-clad foot. “A destined, tragic hero living to be geriatric.” He said it mockingly, but there was the barest shine of hope in his words.   
  
“Maybe,” said the older ghost.   
  
Silence. In the distance, there was the sound like a low grumbling from a dog. Three dogs, actually. And then, “Maybe,” the other one repeated.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://radiojamming.tumblr.com)


End file.
